The man in the back of the room stood up and pointed at me, "There he is, boys. I told you this would happen, and there he is ." I had just finished my presentation to the Sumner County Bar Association in its meeting at the Gallatin Country Club, talking about our plan at Legal Services of Nashville to open a legal aid office in their town to serve low-income people in three suburban/rural counties. The man pointing his finger at me, I learned later, was the circuit court judge for that area. Like many lawyers in our state, he was convinced that Legal Services lawyers were a danger to society and to the legal profession. Twelve years earlier, two leaders of the Tennessee Bar Association had written in the association's quarterly journal that Legal Services was a part of "a headlong plunge into socialism." The title of their impassioned article was "Et tu, Brute!" In 1974, three years before my fateful trip to the country club, a committee appointed by the Nashville Bar Association, after a year-long investigation, found that three of us had committed "unprofessional conduct of the worst sort" by representing people with developmental disabilities against the state, which had been warehousing them without recourse in deplorable conditions. The committee recommended that the bar association board reprimand us for our actions and insisted that the board of our organization should "assure that this sort of thing is discontinued.

" As we will see during the progress of our story, each of these venomous confrontations eventually had a positive outcome, emblematic of some of the profound changes that will occur in the bar, as well as in the law and in society, over the course of our time. This is a story about the struggle to establish civil legal aid in one place in the American South, about the early instability of Legal Services of Nashville, and about its evolution into an effective and broadly supported organization that has provided representation to vulnerable people who were, and often still are, disadvantaged by their lack of access to all parts of our legal system. It is a story about the wide variety of civil legal cases we handled for our clients and some of the improvements we were able to obtain through those cases. The opposition and the backlash that we encountered was not and should not be surprising. Many of our cases challenged societal status quo, racial prejudice, bureaucratic lethargy, and business as usual. They disclosed injustices and called for radical changes. They required thoughtful remedies from courageous judges, responsive legislators, and diligent administrators. And thankfully there is no lack of heroes throughout the story in all three branches of government, judges and other public officials who responded effectively to the plight of our clients.